Let them eat toast, replied O’Dwyer, but those mofos can cost up to $6000 so two good people began a fund-raising campaign for Mr Storrer to get himself a toaster bigger than his very kitchen because this is class warfare and it’s time to pick your feckin side.

Newscorpse immediately launched a savage attack against Duncan, despatching Princess Caroline Overington to find Duncan’s estranged son who when found had nothing good to say about his dad so obviously, dumbo, Duncan had no right to ask his question because his son hates him. No, I’m not linking to Overington’s piece of trash.

Chris (doglover) Kenny’s son has also publicly proclaimed his hatred for his father but Newscorpse doesn’t see that as an impediment to Kenny’s authenticity. Apparently earning over $80,000 a year restores any authenticity one might lose as a consequence of your children hating you.

(There are in fact very many impediments to Kenny’s authenticity: his son’s hatred of him is not one of them.)

According to another Newscorpse Princess, Rita Panhini and some of her followers, the ABC needs to be pilloried for allowing Duncan entry to Qanda in the first place, and no government minister should appear on that show again until the audience is subject to an income test.

Newscorpse then attacked Duncan for not paying any net tax, overlooking the fact that Newscorpse pays no net tax either but that’s OK because Newscorpse has a $6000 toaster it uses to burn to a feckin crisp poor people who ask inconvenient questions so it’s exempted from tax which is only for poor people anyway who have to pay it as punishment for being poor because the doctrine of predestination teaches (read this, it explains a great deal about the LNP) that if God wants you to be rich you’ll be rich and if you aren’t it’s because you’ve pissed him off so NO TOASTER FOR YOU.

Not yet satisfied with the zillion buckets of their own stinking piss they’d poured over Duncan, Newscorpse discovered his rap sheet and plastered Duncan’s offences all over the Herald Sun’s front pages today. Duncan has a record, ergo Duncan may not ask a question on Qanda about income tax.

Yes. This is our country.

Let us not pay attention to the entirely legitimate question Duncan asked, a question many millions of us would dearly love to have answered by Treasurer Scott Morrison or, if we have no other choice, Kelly (let them eat toast) O’Dwyer. Let us instead go through the questioner’s trash cans in a mammoth effort to discredit and invalidate the perfectly legitimate question he is perfectly entitled to ask from his seat in the Qanda audience upon which he is entirely entitled to settle his bum, even if he only earns $20,000 a year, because last time I looked, asking questions didn’t have a means test attached to it.

But wait. There’s more. Newscorpse chief political editor at one of its many sordid publications, Ms Samantha Maiden, will later this month appear in court to be sentenced for drunk driving and leading police not once but twice on a drunken car chase along the Hume Highway and surrounds. In spite of being found guilty of all charges, Ms Maiden has continued to write her regular column, indeed, in one of her first tweets after appearing in court she called a respected economist a dickhead, rather a reckless judgement from an individual who’d just been found guilty of drink driving and attempting to escape not one, but two police pursuits.

For reasons not immediately apparent to this writer, Ms Maiden’s criminal activities do not invalidate her opinions, while Duncan’s do.

Why have the frothing Newscorpse contingent gone after $20,000 a year Duncan like dogs in an advanced stage of rabies? Because Duncan’s question threatened them so profoundly they have to try kill him stone dead, or at the very least, silence him and anyone like him, forever. This is a message from the LNP to the country: Stick your neck out and we’ll set our backers onto you, your family and your life till there’s nothing left of any of it. We will exterminate you.

This is a class war. Make no mistake about it.

In case you still have doubts, yesterday Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull took flight into the exclusive “gentleman’s only” Athanaeum Club for lunch, after being confronted by single mother, Melinda, on the matter of how hard it is raising her children after family tax cuts. As the Huff Post reports it:

The visit [to the exclusive club] comes after the PM addressed a Business Women and Working Mothers Forum in Sydney on Wednesday, and not long after he was confronted on the street by a woman named Melinda who claimed his policies were hurting families.

Apparently he was in a crowded bar after a hard day, the hour was late and he was far from home. A passing femme fatale brushed up against him with her ample breast, and his finger slipped as he was scrolling through his contacts list. (I made that bit up.)

This next bit is true, based on the information we’ve been given. Dutton’s text was meant for Jamie Briggs, who lost his ministerial portfolio only hours earlier after allegedly sexually harassing a subordinate in a crowded bar after a long day when he was far from home and she pierced him with her eyes.

Maiden had just published a column critical of Briggs’ behaviour and apparently Dutton’s text was in response to that criticism, and intended to give Briggs support in his time of trouble. After all, what man needs to listen to the opinions of a mad fucking witch?

Dutton was a member of the governance sub-committee who unanimously decided Briggs had to go, so his vehement disagreement with Maiden’s opinion appears, at first blush, odd. But we are used to odd from the Immigration Minister, aren’t we.

By now Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who seems to have retreated to his multi-million dollar bunker with harbour views to have a good think, might be wishing he’d stayed in merchant banking, as one cabinet minister after another redefines the outer limits of sleaze, sexism, and stupid.

These things frequently, like Tony Abbott’s slogans (and the witches in Macbeth, lololololol) come in threes, so who will be next? I’m keeping my fingers crossed it’s Scott Morrison.

It must be a source of great frustration for Turnbull that his ministers are unable to keep their contempt for women in check, given his recent blatherings on the need for men to show respect towards us as the first step in ending epidemic proportions of violence against us. Ordered by their leader to control their primitive urges, Briggs and Dutton have finally broken bad with the sense of entitlement and contemptuous verbal abuse we are now seeing is the default position of LNP males towards women.

Sooner or later it’s going to sink in that while they might get away with all manner of perfidy, the time when they can abuse women and get away with it is rapidly coming to an end. Or they’ll die out, like the dinosaurs they are, in the unstoppable onslaught of the Mad Fucking Witches’ meteoric wrath.

I cannot wait to see how The Australian journalist Chris Kenny writes up this latest episode. Kenny is a great believer in taking legal action against those who cause him offence. Some of you may remember the controversial suggestion made by The Chaser some years ago that Kenny was a dog fucker, the raising of which possibility landed them in court and caused the ABC to humbly apologise for any tasteless insinuations of bestiality. Logically, Kenny ought to be urging Maiden and the woman in the Hong Kong bar with piercing eyes to call their lawyers, though Kenny and logic are really not words that should appear in the same sentence.

Today we are all Mad Fucking Witches as, apparently, any woman with a mind and an opinion who doesn’t want to be barefoot and pregnant or a member of the LNP, must be. So this Mad Fucking Witch is making a voodoo dolly and buying pins while considering original places where the sun don’t shine in which she might park her broomstick while she does the ironing.

Here’s the thing. It’s very straightforward. Don’t touch us without permission. Don’t verbally abuse us, especially if you don’t know how to send a text. This is what respect means, you dumb fucking warlocks, and if you can’t get your cabbage heads around that come here, and let me pierce you with my eyes. I’m a witch. My gaze is fatal.

Sitting in a cafe in Cooma the other day with nothing to read I flicked through the Sunday Telegraph of December 21. Always a mistake looking at the Tele, but my judgement about everything has been off for months, so what’s one more error.

There I came upon a piece by Samantha Maiden on Senator Jacqui Lambie titled “I’m addicted to my Botox.”

I didn’t have a great deal of interest in that revelation but what did catch my eye was Ms Maiden’s description of the Senator “admitting she’s been single for more than a decade” and later in the paragraph “Ms Lambie admits she’s been single since her thirties.”

Admit is a tricky little word. It’s usually understood to mean confess, as in the offender admits. I’m at a loss to understand why a woman has to admit she’s single, or why Ms Maiden poses the suggestion that Ms Lambie has committed an offence against society by using that word to describe the woman’s relationship status.

Then a few days later came this opinion piece in the Age, questioning Prime Minster Tony Abbott’s references for new Social Services Minister Scott Morrison. He is a decent human being and is married with two little children, the PM declared, ergo the man has learned a depth of compassion the unmarried without children cannot possibly have achieved that more than qualifies him for his new portfolio.

There are echoes here of claims made by Morrison’s previous area of responsibility, the Department for Immigration and Border Protection that simply by being an elected member and Minister of the Crown, Morrison has a unique and profound insight into community standards and values that qualify him to exert unprecedented powers while remaining absolutely unaccountable to anyone.

I have to say here that I disagree with the author of the Age piece when he claims that not having children If anything … strengthens your sense of understanding and empathy for others. That’s just as silly as the claims he’s disputing. Understanding and empathy aren’t dependent on one’s relationship status or parenthood, and it’s just as possible to argue that both situations can lead to all kinds of negative behaviours that aren’t in the least understanding and empathic.

Having spent Christmas time with seriously feral toddlers I can attest to that. The youngest, who has just learned to say “No” and “Mine” spent much of his time snatching his brother’s presents off him then trailing round the house, overwhelmed by the noisy stupidity of it all, alternately chanting and whining “No No No” and “Mine mine mine” at nothing and no one while his brother yowled hideously at the injustice of it all. Tested beyond endurance by our little ones, the adults took to drink. That we all got through it and still love each other is no testament to our compassionate natures but rather to the quality of the champagne.

Anyways, what both Maiden and Abbott’s comments emphasise is the ideology subscribed to by public representatives of the orthodox political and social class whose beliefs continue to dominate Australian society. All one has to do is demonstrate one has a relationship and children to be accepted. How one actually behaves within the family unit is beside the point as long as one is seen to inhabit one.

And this brings me to Richard Flanagan’s Booker prize-winning novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Unfortunately I am far from home in the Snowy Mountains and don’t have my copy with me so can’t directly quote. At one point Flanagan lists the horrors of a long marriage in which neither partner has ever really known the other while one has been chronically unfaithful, and the stunting effects on the offspring of such a union. He ends this lengthy account of unexamined misery with two words: A family.